I might open a can of worms here so I would like to ask everyone to keep this thread civil.

In the last years every time a new mmo came out there were calls that this game is "THE WOW KILLER" .

Almost all of them are considered a failure and many of them did actually fail.

But I want to put the argument forward that this is at least partially due to false expectations and a wrong definition of failure and success for an mmo.

Before WOW a (western) mmo was considered successful with under 1mil customers and even Blizzard did not expect that WoW would be such a success. There is no magic formula why this happened to WoW . In my opinion it was just the right time.

- Asian markets where more accessible and WoW was appealing to these markets

- All the competing games were already well aged and there was no newer competition

- Internet Access in many parts of the world had become cheaper and available in more areas

- Blizzard had great brand recognition

And there are certainly other factors that played into this.

In my opinion this as a once in a century success and there will be no WOW Killer... Not even ESO. WoW will die a slow, profitable death over the next years just like Everquest... just with a much better starting point.

Does this mean ESO will fail? No... it might but only time will tell and only Zenimax can make this decision. If they make money and are happy... SUCCESS! But do the need 10 Million subscribers? 5 Million? Even 2 Million? That depends again on Zenimax and I think they are smart enough to set reasonable expectations and hope for more

The problem is the expectations of the players and the press. Many seem to expect the same success as WOW or close but the market, while he is bigger is also quite different from 10 years ago. There are more games, more different kinds of players and many other factors that while not allow a game to reach the numbers of WOW at it's high point under normal circumstances and without divine intervention.

So I think, that we should not predict numbers and judge the success or failure of ESO based on these. We should just enjoy the game and have Zenimax worry about their profits... only this measures the success of a game and if they do there job they don't need 10 Million players.

WoW was the only one of its kind around at the time. Sure there were other great MMO titles, but WoW was fresh and came from an already well established franchise. The reason no game will be the so called 'WoW killer' is because for one; people are already invested in WoW and it's their home now, for better or for worse, and two; there are so many MMO to choose from now that the market is extremely diluted. No single MMO will ever reach the WoW numbers from when it was in its prime, not even WoW itself.

As for failures.. there are a lot less than you might think. If an MMO is still running, it means it's still making profit. Did it make as much as it could have or did it meet yours or their own expectations? Who cares.. so long as people enjoy playing an MMO and it continues to flourish, it's a success in my eyes.

Thats what I ment. SWTOR is considered by many (press and players) a failure and yea it had a though time but it is still running and actually got better (gameplay got better, some of the F2P options are still ripping players off imho). But the perception is that is failed.

If it failed why does Bioware pay the bill to keep the servers running?

Millions of customers don't make a game a success. It may make a F...ING HUGE SUCCESS for sure. But these number are also hard to reach.

Think Everquest was the big MMO then WOW came, WOW had some benefits:

People was getting bored of Everquest, WOW was new, Blizzard has an good name and had more appeal to more causal players like the option to quest all the way while leveling.

Next you got an snowball effect, WOW become an major brand in it self, more everybody in the 15-25 age know somebody playing WOW so you got some sort of facebook effect drawing in other types of players and as OP says internet had become good enough. Think Asia became more important later.

And you would have problem getting that sort of player numbers anymore as the marked is more fragmented, yes you might be able to do it on the Chinese marked but not in the west.

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Anyway some indications that its 4.5 million players signed up for the ESO beta, not keys sent out, this is running ID numbers for the forum, it looks like the Curse and other giveaway keys did not gave automatic forum access.

Huge numbers don't mean instant success, WoW still has 7mil sub's but I personally believe the game is less immersive and interesting than it was 4 years ago and has slowly slipped since WoTLK. On the other hand look at EVE only something like 600k subs worldwide but is a MASSIVE success and has actually increased it's subs, pay slightly more per month but all content updates are free.

It has already been said but if the player base enjoys the game and the game has enough of them and its enough to make some money then it can be claimed to be a success. I would prefer to have a little of something rather then something of nothing.

I expect this game will have enough of a following to be a success in it's own right for many years to come.

Aside from the reasons listed, WoW just does many things better than even MMOs that came out after it. WoW is the only MMO I know that allows a highly customizable UI through addons among other nifty things. It is fairly comfortable and deceivingly easy. The world is accessible, the lore is reasonably easy to get into and I can see the appeal, albeit I prefer something more complex myself. PvP in WoW is fairly interesting with a whole lot of classes to choose from. PvE is also a strong point in case of WoW I'd say, the instance and raid bosses in WoW have the most intricate and interesting mechanics to this date. I haven't seen any MMO surpass WoW in terms of interesting boss fights yet, only in aesthetics. Some asian mmos have truly amazing looking bosses but the mechanics aren't as refined.

Heck, compare WoW to FF14 AAR, WoW simply wrecks that crap as far as I'm concerned... then again asian gamers seem to have a thing for grinding and I read somewhere WoW suffered a slight loss in subscriptions in Asia when it became more 'casual'. Don't take my word on it though, I might be severely misinformed.

In Asia the situation is "strange" most players play in internet cafes and many "rent" accounts from the cafe. You need a different payment model there. Also the mmo market there is pretty crowded with Asia mmos that are very popular. There are also strict government regulations and cultural tabus. WOW had some problems with this. It still is a big market.

Regarding the 4.5 Million signed up... this is good news but I hesitate to make a prediction based on early numbers. Imho the breaking point for any mmo comes after release when a larger number of players reach max level. ESO has some advantages content wise here but we have to see how this is accepted by players and how fast Zenimax can deliver new content. This will decide how much of a success ESO will be (I have no doubt that ESO will be a reasonable success

WOW is getting old and people notice. I think Blizzard does a good job keeping it alive and fresh but they can't appeal to such a huge, bored crowed. They make mistakes but everyone does. EVE is strange. I love that game but it's damm hard but this makes it so appealing for many.

But I agree with you... as I said... ESO will be at least a reasonable success.

High expectations of anything can ruin your fun, and the product no matter what it is will never live up to them.

Failure, means different things to different people, to me failure is when a new product or service comes out and then they pull the plug on it, to somes a game it is a failure if it does not meet thier expections.. Even if the game is still going strong and has expansions and a solid playerbase, to some because they did not like the game it is a failure to them

success, as a comsumer, it is only a precption, we do not know what a company sets as it's success or highly profitable goals, I have read some mmo's companies have said 300k subs is very profitable, EA said 500k for TOR, but there are still older games out there with a sub like DAOC, still going so it must be making money...

We as comsumers really don't know what the industry sets as success or failure, many time it is much different than what we perceive, but we sure can speculate..

Completely agree Blizzard have done a good job on the whole, it's more as I'm get older I want something different from the stand in one spot and pound the same 4 or 5 buttons.

I spent many years ganking rats in 0.0 space in EVE and was a lot of fun but was a hard game to master.

I think over the last few years, people have realized what an anomaly WoW has been in the marketplace, at least the press if not the players. I don't hear "WoW-killer" nearly as much any more.

Thats what I am trying to say. Only Zenimax can set the bar for success and failure and we as outsiders (Players and Press) should lower our expectations from a WOW Standart to a more reasonable level. WOW won the King of MMOs Title (Based on subscriber number... not on the level you, me or your grandmother likes it)...and it will hold on to it for some time until it steps down because it's too old or some other companie get's lucky.

I agree 100% WOW was fun. But I am ready to move on. Unfortunately innovative new mmos are rare. Even ESO has a lot of the standard WOW pattern from what I can see. But it's in my opinion the best new option on the market.

I just wish that one company would break the "We have to be more like WOW" cycle... we already have a WOW... and it's great.... give us something new (and maybe thats when we get a WOW KILLER!)

That is true. But still it comes up and games that are still doing good (maybe not great but good) are called a failure by the press and players. The expectations are "normalising" again but still... not there yet.

I think the gaming industry always was aware that WOW was the equivalent of winning the lottery while getting struck by lightning on a crashing airplane and surviving it to find atlantis (well more or less ) The people in these companies are smart and do their research. It was more the press that lives of hypes and scandals and we... the players... that eat it up... get all hyped and emotional and then disappointed.

ESO could have been that MMO that broke the standard. But then again, I keep reminding myself how overrated Oblivion and Skyrim truly are in their vanilla states. Morrowind was epic for its time, and Daggerfall was even more so. But what they did to the franchise later on wasn't very pretty, imo. So in the end I am not really all that surprised that ESO isn't anything particularly 'new' either. I certainly had slightly higher expectations for it but I will be playing either way.

I still can't wrap my head around an MMO that would allow freeroaming anywhere at any level though, or whatever you suppose would make the game worthy of being called a 'sandbox' MMO. If players could rush straight into the most interesting zones and do all the quests there then they'd grow bored sooner too. Then again, you could have stratas of zones where you'd have these large areas you'd need to explore before you can venture into a deeper strata, kind of like Dark Souls allows you to do things in an order you prefer instead of going the same linear path every time even though that game could still be considered fairly linear.

As long as TESO can keep up the pay to play model, that to me is successful. I also find that players are far too concerned with subscriber totals and profit margins, it borders on a sick obsession at times.

The problem is the magic to MMO's are all but gone. I remember logging into my first one (swg) and being amazed just to play with other people, to make friends and enemies. There were plenty of both. Thats all gone now for most people. Now its all "my game is awesome, your game is going to fail" nonsense that sprung up in its place on forums, while everyone plays these games solo. The actual interaction that used to take place *in* games now trancends the game and other players are just competition in a race, to that node, to that mob, yadda yadda.

For example, I was a villian in SWG. I would walk into towns or player cities and generally make peoples lives miserable. There was no global chat that anyone used, so we relied on sight and personal messages to communicate. In private tells I was friends with people I was harrassing, there was honor to the trade. Now a villian is just someone who spams barren chat with mockery and garbage and everyone mutes them, Its quite sad.

Until we all just come together as a community and really support a game, an MMO, no game is going to hold that lasting value, and will just be another "play for 3 months and move on". I guess the game is what you make it.

For an MMO to be successfully economically they has to earn back the development cost and make an decent profit.

Now if the game manages this or not has limited impact on the game future, this mostly depend on the income from long term players.

As long as the game is making more money than it cost to run its rarely an reason to shut it down, unless it compete against another MMO they have like SWG was shut down because of SWTOR.

If a game goes F2P mainly depend on if they think it will make more money this way, yes it will also populate servers low level areas who makes the game more attractive. The lates is not so relevant for ESO as it can go down to one shard for the lower level areas and not spread the few low level players over lots of servers.

For may shame as a Star Wars fan I have to say that I was late on the SWG train. But I still think that the world was not ready for this game

The problem is that a sandbox game can be overwhelming in the beginning. Take EVE... the learning curve (Most realistic depiction of the curve here: http://rattlab.net/wp-content/uploads/eve-online-learning-curve.jpg) was just insane! It got better but is still not as good as it could be.

If they started with a good starting experience (skippable pls!) I can only imagine how many more players this game could have by now. SWG had a similar problem and a few other flaws (not to mention the unnameable update later on).

Thats why I was ok with the ESO starting experience. I think Coldharbour should be skippable as after 2-3 chars it is BORING! but getting guided to more linear starting isles was ok for me as this eases up the experience. But there should be an "opt-out" function to just head on to the main part. I have to see how it plays now but it could be ok too.

But a true sandbox mmo is my dream... preferably Shadowrun setting (huge fan!) but that is secondary for me... I would play a good sandbox mmo in any setting (well... almost... not a big fan of the idea of GTA like mmo). A game like that SHOULD... nay NEEDS a great entry level experience that is less sandbox! It is not a good idea to overwhelm player with too much to do and at the beginning take their hand is fine... even for an experienced player. I like a new game to show me around a bit. WoW did that right... But the went to far and made the whole game one big starting experience until you run out of content. This was fun for a while but... don't know about you but I am ready for something new.

Im kinda the opposite in the sense I dont like to know too much, provided I dont make any huge mistakes early on that I cant fix later. I like to learn or ask questions, or just find out for myself. That was the great thing about SWG, they teach you how to shoot a blaster and eat a melon in the tutorial, how to loot stuff and buy a shuttle ticket, the rest my dear lad...is up to you. But I understand that approach may not be as successful in todays environment, I never played WoW, but I assume thats where most people got their impressions of what an MMO should be.

Im enjoying the Dayz mod for the time being, actually Im playing Dayz standalone alpha that I got off steam, that game is hardcoe. Start off with a flashlight and fend for your life. I get a rush just from the possiblity of a player killing me and taking my stuff, while still trying to be a decent guy.

So yeah to me, open world, full PVP, full loot, sandbox with either real world setting or Sci Fi, perma death, and very complex gameplay that one can not hope to master, that would be my ideal. Basically to design a game to my liking would turn off about 98% of other people, so would be the opposite of successful in an MMO sense.

I have always been interested in games and have gone through a wide range a different games enjoying every moment. I never though that I would pay 15$ / month for a MMO game until I bought WoW for my 12 year old son. It was love at first sight and I still remember the thrill it would give when I succeeded in something awesome like getting the recipe for The Vial of the Sands.... So good and beautiful memories.... My theory is that if the game can give the player strong positive feelings of success and win... then it cannot totally fail.

I played all Bethesda′s games and am a huge fan of Elder Scrolls. From what I have seen and learned is that the sheer amount of true dedicated fan′s of The Elder Scrolls is so overwhelming that itself could bring this game to nice profits. After getting to test this game in both BETA - weekends I am convinced that this can not fail. The game delivers the goods it promises even in Beta version! Some individuals are posting tons of trash to the ESO and comparing it to games that have been in the market for years! That is unfair and rightfully are ignored by most of usture fans.

As of to the payment issue.... the bigger payment the better... Keep those away that really do not want to play this game.

Personally I enjoy both entry level experiences equally. But after that it should definitely become more open. The thing is that both options are compatible in my opinion. A nice and soft entry experience for new players and the option (that should not be too obvious so that it is less likely new players will skip) to opt out of this... without punishment.

It is more a question of player numbers because many players don't want to be overwhelmed at the begining but will embrace the Sandbox after easing into it.

You Sir found the secret key to success

I am serious about the Key to Success part I don't think it is a secret. Positive emotions make us form attachments to... well anything. Thats why I think Sandbox Games have the advantage here but are also risky (that's why there are so little) look at Skryrim how much player made content improves the game... the thing is there you can choose the content. In an mmo where a lot of the content is player made (through interaction with the world... take EVE as an example) it can also cause negative emotions (frustration mainly). Many people can't handle that or are not willing to handle that (as it costs time and time is precious).